Edited by Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker, and Kamau Franklin
Haymarket Books
5/20/2025, paperback
SKU: 9798888903742
A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics
The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.
Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.
Reviews:
"Few books will give you a better sense of our times. Or of the love, kindness, joy, music, dancing, intellectual expertise, and irrepressible determination that form the backbone of the social movements resisting authoritarian repression. Share this book with someone in your life, discuss its profound lessons, absorb its spirit together, and take its teachings out into the world."
-- Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil Rights Corps and author of Usual Cruelty and Copaganda
"No Cop City, No Cop World is a story about organizers in motion who battled and continue to fight for their community against politicians, police, and organized capital. You will leave with more questions than when you began. This is the mark of an excellent book. The lessons from Stop Cop City should inform our current organizing efforts everywhere. The book underscores that criminalization is the indispensable fuel of fascism. It's timely, necessary, and required reading." -- Mariame Kaba, organizer and coauthor of Let This Radicalize You
"A masterclass in mapping power and movement building delivered by a chorus of community organizers on the front lines of the fight to Stop Cop City. This inspiring collection points toward what is possible through principled struggle and a collective commitment to a multiracial, multigenerational, multi-tendency, multi-tactic, united front to fight for and practice a world beyond policing, extraction, displacement and organized abandonment of Black and Indigenous communities and the lands they call home. The experiments, lessons, reflections, and strategies for navigating solidarity, struggle, conflict, repair, realignment, and resistance to repression reflected in these insightful and beautifully written essays are essential for everyone committed to fighting the violence of policing, authoritarianism, and fascism in the U.S. in the current moment and those to come. Next step: Stop Cop Nation!" -- Andrea J. Ritchie, co-founder Interrupting Criminalization, author of Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies, and co-author of No More Police: A Case for Abolition
About the Editors:
Micah Herskind is an organizer, writer, and law student. He is active in abolitionist movements against police and jail expansion, and has written for outlets including New York Magazine, Scalawag, MSNBC, Teen Vogue, and Race & Class.
Mariah Parker is an emcee and labor organizer born and raised in the South. Their cultural work and organizing have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Teen Vogue, SPIN Magazine, Al Jazeera, Scalawag, and Hammer & Hope.
Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builder, a Black, member-based collective of community residents and organizers. Kamau has been a dedicated community organizer for over thirty years and is a former practicing attorney, beginning in New York City and now based in Atlanta.